The materials and techniques that we use to create architectural

representations undoubtedly affect how we apprehend the work

of architecture being depicted. By analogy, if we consider Leonardo

da Vinci’s oil-on-poplar depiction of Lisa Gherardini next to a pencil

sketch, a comic-book style half-tone, and a graffiti-based interpreta-

tion of the Mona Lisa, it’s clear that each medium maintains its own

set of associations, while, at the same time, clearly communicates

its content and reference. The medium is not perhaps the whole

message, but it is an important component of our experience of

images and drawings.

It is also true that the choice of a particular mode of drawing during

the design process can profoundly shape the object being designed.

Any student of architecture can rattle off the implications of choosing

Rhino, Sketch-Up, Maya, AutoCad, or Revit to work through an archi-

tectural design problem, particularly in terms of the forms and details

that each software facilitates easily or with difficulty. Robin Evans’

insights about drawing’s fundamental difference from its content, and

yet the agency it maintains in the shaping of that content, turns out to

be just as true in the digital age as it was in the era of hand drawing.1

Unfortunately, the professional trend toward hyperreal

image-making has meant concealing the drawing’s own construction

process¬es and neutering its space-generating potential. The specu-

lative and uncertain nature of hand-production is sublimated in favor

of the glossy render that makes the proposed appear as already-real.

The pendulum is already swinging away from this tendency in some

academic and professional circles, largely under the banner of the

post-digital.2 Despite a return to orthography, collage, and an “illus-

trated” rather than “rendered” sensibility, the so-called post-digital

largely remains stubbornly digital. How, in a world saturated with

Instagram-worthy architectural images, can we teach our students to

reinvest in a drawing-based design process that is experimental and

open-ended? How can drawing itself be reinvigorated both in terms

of its representational agency and its abilities to produce new kinds

of form and space?

STUDIO: PRODUCTIVE ANACHRONISM

The upper-level undergraduate design studio that I led at Miami

University in Oxford, OH in Spring 2010 pursued answers to these

questions through a program of design research into a tradition-

ally feminine, historical craft that has recently become new again:

paper quilling. Paper quillwork, or paper filigree as it is also known,

is a medium of representation dating back centuries to disputed ori-

gins, and one that took on particular importance in the United States

by the 18th- and 19th-centuries. Strips of colored or gilded paper

were wound in coils and pressed by hand into various geometric and

organic shapes. These were then assembled into a variety of pictorial

arrangements: scenes of country life featuring architectural façades,

floral bouquets, and devotional objects among others.3

More recently, there has been a resurgence of interest in paper

quilling at a range of levels, including fine artists, commercial graphic

designers, and amateur hobbyists. This, in turn, has led to an expan-

sion of quilling techniques that move beyond flat, coil-based prac-

tices and traditional subjects. Some contemporary quillworkers like

Elizabeth M. KeslacyMiami University

Productive Anachronism Paper Quilling and the Craft of Architectural Representation

206

Amy Genser and Lisa Nilsson utilize three-dimensional thick shapes

or finer, more precise work than we find historically.4 Other artists

like Yulia Brodskaya have embraced a new graphic emphasis on out-

line, or they treat paper like paint to create impressionistic imag-

ery.5 At the same time, there has been a proliferation of inexpensive

tools and materials that make paper quilling one of the most accessi-

ble crafts today.

As an instructor designing a new upper-level undergraduate

studio, I bet on a hunch that paper quilling could offer a great deal

to architectural design and representation as an agent of innova-

tion. The German psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer has described the

“hunch” as a gut feeling or an intuition that appears quickly in con-

sciousness and is strong enough to act upon, despite the fact that one

may not fully understand its underlying reasons or logic.6 Gut feel-

ings, or hunches, aren’t just flashes of inspiration, but operate accord-

ing to a heuristic rationale: simple rules of thumb that take advantage

of our evolved human mental capacities.7 These are shortcuts to deci-

sion-making and ideas-generation that reduce complexities in order

to posit actionable rules.

The hunch at work here was that paper quilling had something to

offer to architecture. But what was the heuristic at work? If the goal

was to introduce a new medium into architecture as a potential source

of innovation, the heuristic was this: find something that isn’t explic-

itly architecture which is nevertheless architectural. In other words,

find something that shares some qualities with architectural drawing,

but that’s different enough to introduce an element of novelty. Paper

quilling seemed a promising candidate.

A hunch alone is not enough to put a complex proposition into

practice. Heuristics are useful in split-second decision-making, but

the follow-through requires other skills. Luis Perez-Breva, director of

innovation at MIT, has written about the processes by which a hunch

is developed into an innovation, something he defines as both novel

and impactful.8 The initial phase of this development is something he

calls “innovation prototyping,” a process that is incremental, nonlin-

ear and experimental. In it, the hunch is given the structure of a small-

er-scale problem that is solvable, recognizable, and verifiable.9 Only

later is it scaled up.

I utilized the process that Perez-Breva describes to transform my

hunch into a practicable, structured, studio-based design research

inquiry. I began with a series of four short exercises designed to

develop students’ quilling skills, expose the biases of quilling as a rep-

resentational medium, and explore how quilling techniques could

be employed in an experimental, open-ended design process. I

then “scaled up” for the studio’s final project, which was the design

of a “Museum of Minor Arts.” This project presented an opportuni-

ty to instrumentalize the techniques developed in preceding exper-

imental exercises in the service of an architectural design project.

Moreover, the project’s program served as a venue to think about the

cultural value of the so-called minor arts, a category to which quilling

belongs, through the design of spaces for their collection, exhibi-

tion, and practice.

PAPER QUILLING: FROM CRAFT TO MEDIUM

We began the series of short exercises by borrowing a format from

the sister craft of embroidery – the sampler. Samplers are collections

of techniques and demonstrations of skill, and they can depict a wide

variety of content: alphabets and aphorisms, maps and architectural

facades, abstract and floral patterns, as well as perspectival, pictorial

scenes.10 For this assignment, students were asked to utilize the basic

shapes of traditional quillwork to create their own sampler, compos-

ing it according to a known sampler type.

Some students hewed closely to samplers that featured repeated

motifs, borders, and other linear patterns. (Figure 1) Others were

inter-ested in the pictorial samplers that featured building facades

or ani-mals, while yet others looked to more contemporary

examples that emphasized color and composition. The students

came away from this assignment with an appreciation for the

necessity of good crafts-manship, and some understanding about the

pictorial possibilities and limitations inherent to the quillwork shapes.

The second short assignment, entitled “Draw it New,” focused

more specifically on architectural representation. In it, I asked

Figure 1. Quillwork Samplers by Ariana Smith (left), Rachel Staley (center), and Cooper Shira (right).

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Figure 3. Examples of perspectival drawings from the Draw It New exercise.(top) Superstudio’s Continuous Monument (1969-70) by Alex Bellman (bottom) Giovanni Batista Piranesi, Carceri Plate XIV (1761) by Rachel Justice.

and coil to reinterpret the drawings, and added non-quillwork ele-

ment – in one case, image, and in the other, flat areas that broke down

the deep space into a series of planes.

Students found other interesting strategies for dealing with the

problem of depth. One student used real depth to recreate a plate

from Lebbeus Woods’ War and Architecture (1997), literally stack-

ing layers of quillwork and flat paper on top of one another. (Figure

4) In an interpretation of Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetary (1971),

a student used a variety of quillwork techniques, including accordion

folds, rectangular coils, open swirls, and flat planes, to represent dif-

ferent kinds of surfaces, shadows, and elements as they layer back in

space. Through this exercise, we learned that quillwork can lend an air

of whimsy and informality, but it can also add texture and detail that

prolongs the viewer’s engagement with the drawing.

The third exercise, entitled “Type-Type,” began with a purpose-

ful elision of typography and architectural typology. In preparation

for the final project, I asked students to choose an existing design

museum and to extract a parti diagram from its plan that illustrated

the relationship between exhibition space and all other functions. At

the same time, students chose a letter from a select group of fonts.

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They were asked to quill them both as base conditions. Then, they

applied three kinds of transformations to both the parti diagram

and the letterform – operations such as to stretch, to bend, to frag-

ment, or to rotate.

The assignment imposed a particular attitude towards prece-

dent—one that both learns from past projects but also subjects them

to radical transformations to produce new forms and ideas. The aim

here was to base those transformations in the logic of quillwork itself.

Interestingly, some of the most suggestive results were those that

deviated from traditional methods. Those included some that layered

up or carved into the base, those that turned the strip perpendicular

to its typical orientation, or manipulated the paper strip in novel ways,

like crinkling.

The final exercise, entitled “Thick Form,” introduced the third

dimension to our quilling experiments. Up until this point, we had

essentially utilized quilling in a “thick-flat” mode, meaning that the

work was for the most part of uniform thickness and followed the

logic of extrusion. This could also be described as “two-and-a-half

dimensional.” In this last assignment, the students were asked to use

quillwork to turn a corner, creating a fully three-dimensional object.

Students responded in one of two ways. One set of responses cre-

ated quillwork “walls” that were joined together at the corner

through a simple butt-joint. (Figure 5) These walls were made more

complex by changes in color or through the occasional thickening of

the wall with additional quillwork elements. A second strategy

involved stacking layers of quillwork shapes in one direction only to

create solid thick-ness. (Figure 6) One example kept the thickness

fairly uniform through-out, creating an interesting visual

complexity in the view through the layers. Another utilized the

same technique to create different effects on each face.

In the course of the four preliminary exercises, we used quillwork

both representationally and at a one-to-one scale to immerse our-

selves in its architectural possibilities. We worked planimetrically,

perspectivally, abstractly and three-dimensionally – and we were

ready to deploy our skills and knowledge in a more traditionally

defined architectural design project.

QUILLWORK AS DESIGN TOOL

The second half the studio was thus devoted to a design project that

enrolled quillwork in the design of a speculative “Cincinnati Center

for the Minor Arts.” The students were asked to choose a particular

minor art on which their institution would focus, including architec-

ture, the decorative arts, and folk art, among others. The program

brief outlined five principle types of spaces that would make up the

museum: spaces for reception and visitors, exhibition spaces, cura-

torial spaces, storage spaces, and maker spaces where the public

could themselves engage in the chosen minor art—all for a total of

25,000 square feet.

The project was sited in Cincinnati’s historic Lytle

Park, home to a small, specialized fine arts institution

called the Taft Museum. The Taft presents the fine and

decorative arts collections of Anna Sinton Taft and Charles Phelps

Taft, brother of President William Howard Taft, in a historically

Figure 4. Examples from the Draw It New exercise.(top) Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo Cemetary (1971) by Willow O’Keefe (bottom) Lebbeus Woods, War and Architecture “New Parliament” (1997) by Rachel Justice.

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significant Federal Style structure. Our site was located just across

the street from the Taft, and as such was very much in conversation

with that institution.

The sequence of work on the project was not only designed to

incorporate techniques of quillwork into the design process, but

also to facilitate consideration of the cultural value of the minor arts.

By considering how such a building is designed and organized, how

it stages the display of objects and people, and how it relates to its

site and surrounding neighborhood (particularly the Taft Museum),

the projects could articulate something about the role of these

arts in society.

The sequence of work on the project was designed to incorporate

techniques of quillwork into the design process. For example, the ini-

tial work involved a series of quilled sections that articulated possi-

ble relationships between building and ground, and between the

required programmatic elements. Some sections utilized the paper

strips in novel ways that challenged drawing conventions. One stu-

dent lifted the section cut-line off of the page to produce intriguing

effects, and experimented with different tones of paper as an analog

to lineweight. (Figure 7) Others utilized color and collage in

combination with the paper line to articulate programmatic

adjacencies. In another student’s drawings, the depth of the quilled

paper line became a kind

Figure 5. Examples from the Thick Form exercise depicting one common solution, the butt-joint corner. (left) Ariana Smith (right) Martha Everly

Figure 6. Examples from the Thick Form exercise depicting a second common solution using stacked layers of quillwork shapes. (left) Cooper Shira (right) Richelle Boyd

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of formwork for another material—plaster—which created thickness

in the drawing of a different sort. (Figure 8)

The logic of quillwork informed the projects in a variety of ways,

some formally and some more conceptually. One project liberated

the paper strip from the page to create a three overlapping, bulbous

forms that would house her museum of paper arts. The quilled sec-

tions of this form, explored how using the paper strips both flat and on

their edge in a range of tones could communicate depth.

One student decided to create a museum of ceramics, and won-

dered whether the site of creation—the kiln—couldn’t provide for-

mal cues for the exhibition galleries as the site of consumption. The

spiral path of the rolled coil was used to organize the site and circu-

lation. Galleries were looped around an open courtyard, with visitor

spaces and offices peeling away from the core. Inside, ramps spiral up

the sides of the kiln forms in a sinusoidal pattern, leading visitors to

ascend and descend, to go forward and double back, adding complex-

ity to the experience of the galleries.

Quillwork informed the display strategy of another student’s proj-

ect, particularly in the design of a display armature. Here the paper

strip was reimagined as an endless double-sided display surface that

alternated between a large platform for featured items and thickened

storage to house the bulk of the collections. This armature could be

woven through an open display area, be used to surround structural

columns, and extend vertically to engage the second-floor catwalks

that crisscrossed the space.

DRAWING WITH PAPER

Taken as a whole, the students’ responses to the sequence of assign-

ments prompts consideration of a question that is fundamental to the

whole enterprise: What does it mean to draw with paper?

First, paper quilling refashions paper from a passive recipient of

pencil or ink into the very medium of drawing itself. Marco Frascari

has argued that paper is “an essential ingredient of architectural con-

ceiving,”11 pointing out that paper and its various qualities of texture

and translucency are a necessary precondition for the process of

design and documentation. In this work, paper is no longer a “passive

technology,” but becomes the active, mark-making device itself. Just

like ink, pencil, or laser printer, the use of paper as a representation-

al medium comes with baggage. That is, it is a medium with “tenden-

cies” that must be acknowledged, learned, and ultimately exploited to

produce its unique effects.12 For paper quillwork, those tendencies

include its capacities for color, the inherency of the spiral in its coiled

forms, and the shadows that are created as a corollary of its depth.

Secondly, paper quilling introduces real thickness into drawing

genres, such as the plan and elevation, that have long-established

conventions for representing depth. Those conventions include dark-

er lines for objects being cut, thinner lines for objects farther away,

dashed lines to indicate objects beyond or above, etc. Translating

those conventions of implying depth into the a medium with real

depth is not a seamless enterprise. Rather, it requires the drafts-

person to grapple with those conventions, and reformulate them to

account for a medium of material thickness. As such, it introduces a

productive element of ambiguity into the drawing. When that hap-

pens, quillwork drawings can be interpreted in multiple ways, allow-

ing them to be generative in modes unforeseen to the designer.

In his essay “How architectural drawings work,” Sonit Bafna divid-

ed architectural drawing into two categories borrowed from the

philosopher Nelson Goodman: the notational and the imaginative.

Figure 7. Speculative quillwork sections of the studio’s design project, a Center for the Minor Arts, by Willow O’Keefe.

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Notational drawings specify but do not depict, and they draw heav-

ily on convention to create what he terms a “mechanical” relationship

between drawing and object.13 Imaginative drawings, on the other

hand, are primarily aesthetic in nature, and they require the viewer to

engage with them creatively because of their inherent ambiguity. In

notational drawings, which are most typically orthographic drawings

like plan and section, the drawing medium is unremarkable and for

the most part invisible to the decoding process. In contrast, drawing

medium is an important element of imaginative drawings, which are

often but not exclusively perspectival. Drawing on the art historian

Michael Podro’s work, Bafna argues that “the look of the drawing pro-

cedure” becomes “a way of perceiving what is being represented.”14 In

other words, how the drawing is made becomes a subject of the view-

er’s attention and an important factor in the viewer’s understanding

of its content.

The introduction of quillwork into architectural drawing ultimate-

ly elides the distinction between notational and imaginative drawing.

Its materiality makes convention itself the site of ambiguity and play,

requiring the viewer to prolong their engagement and to create rath-

er than simply decode its meaning.

Notes I am grateful to my colleagues at Miami University’s Department of

Architecture and Interior Design for their support, encouragement,

and critical feedback during the studio. I am also proud of the

students, who were willing to join me in this experimental process

and produced work that none of us could have imagined when we

began. All photographs are reproduced courtsey ofthe author.

1. Robin Evans, “Translations from Drawing to Building,” inTranslations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 152-93.

2. Sam Jacob, “Drawing in a Post-Digital Age,” Metropolis 36, No.8 (2017): 76-91.

3. Images of historical quillwork objects can be found in the online digital collections of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum and the Winterthur Museum,Garden, and Library.

4. See Amy Genser’s work at amygenser.com. Lisa Nilsson’s workcan be found at lisanilssonart.com

5. See Yulia Brodskaya’s work at artyulia.co.uk

6. Gerd Gigerenzer, Gut Feelings: The Intelligence of theUnconscious (New York: Viking, 2007), 16.

7. Ibid, 18.

8. Luis Perez-Breva, Innovating a Doer’s Manifesto for Startingfrom a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling up, andLearning to Be Productively Wrong (Cambridge, MA: MITPress, 2016), 19.

9. Ibid, 41.

10. The V&A has an excellent and well-illustrated primer onthe history of embroidery samplers, at vam.ac.uk/content/articles/h/a-history-of-samplers/

11. Marco Frascari, “A Reflection on Paper and Its Virtues withinthe Material and Invisible Factures of Architecture,” in FromModels to Drawings: Imagination and Representation inArchitecture, ed. Marco Frascari, Jonathan Hale, and BradleyStarkey (London; New York: Routledge, 2007), 23.

12. Fraser and Henmi characterized the “tendencies” or biasesof pencil versus ink as drawing media, describing the soft shading and taut opaque lines that they, respectively, offer. IainFraser and Rod Henmi, Envisioning Architecture: An Analysis ofDrawing (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1994), viii.

13. Sonit Bafna, “How Architectural Drawings Work — and WhatThat Implies for the Role of Representation in Architecture,” The Journal of Architecture 13, no. 5 (2008), 537.

14. Ibid, 548.

Figure 8. Speculative quillwork sections of the studio’s design project, a Center for the Minor Arts, by Rachel Staley.

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